Year: 2011

I didn’t recognize the Warriors team that decisively dismantled the Knicks Wednesday night. After all these years of mediocre, deeply-flawed basketball, that’s the highest compliment I can pay them. We’re currently witnessing a team growing by leaps and bounds quarter to quarter. I expected there to be a learning curve with a collection of new players finding their roles, Mike Malone implementing his defensive system, and Mark Jackson trying to mold the team’s character — but I never expected the team to roar up that curve so quickly. The G-forces from this sudden climb have me dizzy. It wasn’t the score or the opponent that made this otherwise inconsequential, beginning-of-the-season win so exhilarating. It was the strategic, aggressive, honest way the team won it. If they keep this up, we’re going to have a Warriors team that is worthy of our support.

The Warriors 99-91 victory over the Chicago Bulls was a big win. Period, full stop. Whether it was a “false-dawn” big win or “start-of-something” big win will be determined over the next days and weeks. But for a coaching staff looking to teach a team the importance of defense — in all of its sweaty, bruising, unglamorous glory — there could be no better positive reinforcement than what the Warriors pulled off Monday night. It looked tenuous at times and wasn’t pretty at the end, but the team entered the game with a clear defensive plan, executed it, and walked off with a win. Having blogged about this team for six years now (and lived and died with it for another 20 years before that), I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to write that last sentence.

The NBA is a superstar’s league. Until the Warriors land one, there are still going to be a lot of nights like Sunday’s 86-105 loss to the Clippers. You can change the coaching staff, upgrade the bench and see marginal improvement from good (not great) players — all positive developments — but when the intensity of the fourth quarter becomes oppressive, there are few in the NBA that can carry the load. Chris Paul is one of them. The Warriors are still searching for their man.

The Warriors’ fate this season, like always, comes down to a series of “ifs.” If the team can build upon the aggressive defense and selfless offense their new coaching staff debuted this preseason, if Stephen Curry’s ankles hold up for an entire season, and if Monta Ellis can maintain focus amidst a legal storm, the Warriors should be an improved team from the .439 squad that finished 12th in the West law year. The only catch? Their record may not reflect that improvement, at least not initially.

In their last exhibition game the Warriors violated the first rule of preseason basketball: make it out of preseason basketball in one piece. The collective groan from Warriors fans when Stephen Curry once again rolled his ankle was loud enough to be heard in Sacramento. But on a night plagued by injuries, lawsuits and some brutally ugly shooting, there was solace to be found in the little things. The Warriors may have lost the game, but the team still showed major improvement where it needs it most.

There are certain things all good teams do: they move the ball; they patiently work for high-percentage looks; they maintain defensive spacing; they fight through screens; they close out on shooters. We don’t know yet how good the 2011-12 Warriors will be, but the team on the floor Saturday night in Oakland came closer to doing the things good teams do than any Warriors team in recent memory. The Mark Jackson/Mike Malone era is one game old, but so far I like what I’ve seen.

Can you have a different team with largely the same players? That’ll be the first — and biggest — question hanging over the 2011-12 Warriors as they kick off their pre-season on Saturday at the Oracle. This team has plenty in common with the 2010-11 model that missed the playoffs by 10 games, but Mark Jackson and Mike Malone are hoping that new faces on the bench bring new results on the court. Although it’ll take more than catch-phrases and good intentions to turn this team around, there are a few clear reasons for optimism.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that “ambition is the last refuge of failure.” The Warriors’ abbreviated off-season kicked off with plenty of ambition, but there’s no masking that its likely conclusion — the signing of Kwame Brown — is a failure. Brown undoubtedly will help the team at the margin. But in the big picture, he’s does very little to close the gap between the Warriors and respectability. Warriors fans have far too much experience talking themselves into lackluster deals of all shapes and sizes, whether its Corey Maggette, Mikki Moore or David Lee. But no matter how many potential upsides you scrounge to find in these deals, you circle back to the same uncomfortable truth: the Warriors need a difference maker, and they didn’t get one.

We’ll know by Wednesday at the latest — when the Clippers’ 72-hour matching period is up — whether the Warriors’ free agency period has been a fruitful one, or just busy. Even if it ends up being the latter, there are some clear differences between this ownership group and Chris Cohan. Lacob and Co. have yet to sell off any talent or draft picks, they’ve at least identified the team’s two leading problems (defense and size) and they’re willing to put up money to address them. But despite clear signs of effort by the front office, the Warriors more likely than not are going to end up in the same place Chris Cohan did most off-seasons: trying to gild some last-ditch move as a real step towards improvement. As Joe Lacob is learning the hard way this year, it takes more than talk and effort to assemble a winning team.

Where to start? On February 1, 1984, David Stern became commissioner of the NBA. A few months later, Michael Jordan entered the league. Stern’s brilliance for promotion and spectacle was paired with the perfect vehicle for his agenda. Players became brands and owners watched the crowds, TV cameras and cash flood into a previously struggling league. Stern orchestrated the entire billion-dollar show. But at some point — some unnoticed moment — David Stern became a victim of his own success. The players he once relentlessly promoted started to understand the power they wielded within the league. Owners drunk on record-breaking profits came to expect the same year after year. There were ups and downs along the way — Jordan’s retirement, the first lockout, the Palace brawl — but somehow Stern still seemed capable of pushing and pulling the levers of power, keeping the mighty owner/player industry he had assembled surging forward. On December 8, 2011, David Stern’s creation may have finally overpowered him. And at the moment all hell broke loose in the league Stern had just managed to stitch back together, it was only fitting that the NBA should cite in Stern’s defense the one thing he had ignored for so long: “basketball reasons.”